Darkest Dungeon 2 Announced

Red Hook Studio, the developers behind the grim roguelike Darkest Dungeon, have announced a sequel. The teaser trailer suggests that players will be travelling to an icy mountain known as ‘The Howling End.’ Released back in 2016 after a successful Kickstarter, Darkest Dungeon put players in the role of someone arriving to a weathered estate previously owned by a mysterious ancestor. By hiring various characters and sending them into several dungeons, players must clear out the horrors brought about by the Ancestor’s experiments and unravel the mystery behind their homecoming.

The game got two expansion packs: Crimson Court introduced mosquito-themed vampiric horrors while The Color of Madness introduced an Endless Quest themed around the Lovecraft story The Color Out of Space.

The 30-second teaser trailer doesn’t offer too much concrete detail. We can see six of the original game’s classes. There’s the Grave Robber, the Leper, the Man-at-Arms, the Plague Doctor, the Highwayman, and the Hellion. No doubt we can expect new classes in the new game. We also get to hear the powerful voice of the Ancestor, voiced by Wayne June.

A good deal of our information on the game comes from an exclusive interview Tyler Sigman and Chris Bourassa of Red Hook Studios did with PC Gamer. The two said that Wayne June will be lending his voice to the sequel, along with the rest of the original game’s audio contributors: composer Stuart Chatwood and SFX-crafters Power Up. They’re playing pretty close to their chest about gameplay details, but players can expect a new metagame structure and a reworked combat system. As for the story, they want to give players “a glimpse of the supernatural apocalypse twisting and distorting the world beyond the estate.”

Darkest Dungeon 2 will be releasing sometime in the future via Early Access. You can sign up for the studio’s mailing list here to get more details as they release.